The title of the piece is in ref­er­ence to an argu­ment between two of the composer’s friends, regard­ing the mean­ing of form in new music. The piece explores this ques­tion musi­cally: is it in ternary form or not?

Only a small part of music is actually about sound. The majority of music-making has to do with social interactions more than anything else. Music fulfills certain functions (usually pre-determined) within certain social situations, or serves as a replacement for various social functions when we use it in private. Therefore, music can be said to be a community-normed phenomenon: what makes music music are the people who find a use for it, usually by listening.

On top of that, the most useful (or best) pieces of music are generally those for which there is the most consensus on usage: Beethoven’s ninth symphony and Michale Jackson’s album, Thriller are both “good” because a lot of people agree that they are good; i.e., a lot of people have found those two pieces of music useful for certain social functions.

Anyway, these were some of the thoughts running through my head while writing this piece, and they influenced my choice and usage of musical materials.

Cul­ture no.1 is the first in a series of three pieces that deal with the chang­ing role of music in cul­ture, and I wrote it while work­ing on my Master’s degree at UC San Diego. The impe­tus for the piece was a series of four unre­lated sam­ples (and one deriv­a­tive sample) that I found on my hard drive, left over from other projects. The sam­ples play at var­i­ous points in the music, and in one way or another, the instru­men­tal parts derive their mate­r­ial from them.

In Cul­ture no.1, I wanted to focus on sev­eral issues that I saw as par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to our rapidly chang­ing cul­ture milieu. These include an imme­di­ate and simple pre­sen­ta­tion of mate­r­ial, clar­ity of pur­pose, the high­est pos­si­ble degree of sim­plic­ity in the orga­ni­za­tion of mate­r­ial, and musi­cal ideas that can live “in the moment”, with­out the need to ref­er­ence large sec­tions of the piece on mul­ti­ple levels. These are themes that have remained impor­tant to me since and have also fig­ured promi­nently in the sub­se­quent two pieces in the Cul­ture series.

When I first wrote Cul­ture no.1, I thought of it in terms of a dichotomy between pop­u­lar music and the West­ern clas­si­cal tra­di­tion. How­ever, in the sub­se­quent years I’ve tem­pered my inter­pre­ta­tion. I no longer see a con­flict between tra­di­tions, only a reflec­tion on the rit­u­als of music-making. It is also, to a point, a test­ing of cul­tural con­ven­tions par­tic­u­lar to the concert-music ritual. This focus on ritual and cul­tural con­ven­tion is what I think makes the piece suc­cess­ful in the end. I’ve gotten a lot of strong reac­tions to Cul­ture no.1, from “incomprehensible” to “masterpiece”. For me, that kind of polar­iza­tion always speaks to the cul­tural res­o­nance of a work of art, and cul­tural res­o­nance is cer­tainly appro­pri­ate to the theme I wanted to explore.

This is the middle piece in my Cul­ture series, which is an explo­ration of the effects that today’s cul­tural con­text has on making our music what it is. The text for the piece is taken from a junk e-mail mes­sage—cer­tainly among the more recent of lit­er­ary genres. It attracted me because it is com­posed entirely of mono­syl­labic words, with no rep­e­ti­tion; a kind of het­ero­ge­neous stream that strikes me as contemporary.

The middle sec­tion of the piece is inde­ter­mi­nate or open: the per­form­ers decide how the musi­cal mate­ri­als will be pre­sented. This is also some­thing that I take from the Cul­ture theme, because the mul­ti­plic­ity of pos­si­bil­i­ties, end­less var­ie­ga­tion, and the impos­si­bil­ity of find­ing “right” answers seem to me impor­tant cul­tural prob­lems today.

Cul­ture no.3 is the last in a series of pieces that deals with the ways that modern pop­u­lar cul­ture can inform West­ern art music. More specif­i­cally, Cul­ture no.3 is involved in explor­ing the inter­re­la­tion between the vis­ceral ele­ments of pop­u­lar music and timbre. By vis­ceral ele­ments, I mean, for exam­ple, the sense of motion, the force­ful­ness of the artic­u­la­tions, or the char­ac­ter of the rhythm or tempo, to name a few. The tra­di­tional pitch resources of the pop­u­lar sphere have required that vis­cer­al­ity and timbre play a greater role in defin­ing pop­u­lar genres (and sub­se­quently in deter­min­ing what we find inter­est­ing within them) than is seen in the major­ity of West­ern art music. Cul­ture no.3, with a greater empha­sis on timbre and vis­cer­al­ity and a sub­se­quently lesser empha­sis on other aspects of the musi­cal whole, uses the resources of the West­ern ensem­ble to fea­ture this aspect of pop­u­lar music.

Desde was written in the summer of 2004 and is my first orchestral work. In several of the pieces leading up to Desde, I had begun experimenting with ways of dealing with the problem of culturally biased musical perception, which colours all musical experiences. This came about as I compared my non-classical music education with the formal experiences I received in university, and I wanted to find ways to combine what I felt at the time to be several often-conflicting methods of hearing music.

Much of my recent work deals with the issue of reappropriation. Where do we get our ideas? What do we owe, if anything, to our sources of inspiration? Historically, composers have stolen ideas from each other regularly, reworking these into their music and taking all the credit (and the money, if they could). The invention of copyright was the first attempt at giving credit to the originators of ideas, but this has evolved over time into a corporate-controlled system of property that promotes the fiction that new ideas somehow spontaneously appear out of nothingness.

Composers have always taken each others’ ideas, and if they didn’t, there would be no composing. But now the big music companies would want us to believe that this is somehow wrong. It is, certainly, wrong to profit from the work of others without making any contribution oneself, but there are many uses of existing music that do make new, meaningful contributions. For this reason, I’ve taken an interest in quotation, collage, and related techniques. It’s a way to pay homage to the music that has influenced me while at the same time exposing the false idea that creativity comes out of nothingness. So here I am, cards on the table, showing everyone the music I was thinking of when working on this piece—by quoting that music.

Thus the title Elegy of Others. I wanted to write a piece that was reflective and sombre, and I wanted to make it a collage of the work of others. This was a particular challenge, because I have found collage better suited to fast, upbeat music than it is to the slow and sombre; quotations tend to lose their character when the tempo is slow, and phrases made up of long quotes do not cohere very well. For this reason, I had to approach this piece differently than in my previous work, transforming the material in more extreme ways for the sake of musical expression. In Elegy of Others, therefore, the quotations are not always immediately recognizable, though they do come to the surface periodically. Nevertheless, almost every note in Elegy of Others is quoted, with few exceptions. The pieces quoted are, in order of appearance:

1. The Four Seasons, “Drunkards Asleep”, Antonio Vivaldi, 1723
2. “The Girl from Ipanema”, Antonio Carlos Jobim, 1962
3. “Everybody Hurts”, R.E.M., 1992
4. “Dazed and Confused”, Led Zeppelin, 1968
5. Die schöne Müllerin, “Des Müllers Blumen”, Franz Schubert, 1823

Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments is based on a sequence of very brief text frag­ments extracted from a much longer poetic work, enti­tled I Lost Every­thing by poet Sarah Lang. The piece always presents this series of word-units in order and with­out over­lap. Each unit is spoken—not sung—at the begin­ning of a musi­cal ges­ture, and always by the per­former who is play­ing the ges­ture. Each unit is also repeated mul­ti­ple times.

I have decided on this approach in order to dis­tance the text from any fixed nar­ra­tive. The music instead pro­vides a space for these lan­guage objects to be observed in, and in which the lis­tener can choose to create or not create his or her own nar­ra­tive. Pre­sented in this mono­lithic manner and detached from the con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of lan­guage prepo­si­tions, Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments sets up the oppor­tu­nity for a kind of mytho­log­i­cal reac­tion to develop around the pre­con­cep­tions of the lis­tener. The word-units com­bine with the music to create hints, but hope­fully hints that will take each lis­tener in a dif­fer­ent direction.

Flüsse-Einflüsse is German for Streams-Influences. The con­cept of the con­ver­gence of mul­ti­ple streams of influ­ence is impor­tant to me, because I am a clas­si­cal com­poser coming from a jazz and pop back­ground. Sim­i­larly, the 2004/2005 DAAD Sound Under­stand­ing con­cert for which Flüsse-Einflüsse was writ­ten fea­tured both clas­si­cal and jazz per­form­ers. This idea of mul­ti­ple streams con­verg­ing is car­ried through­out the piece on sev­eral levels, from the mate­r­ial (taken from two of my favourite jazz tunes but reworked clas­si­cally), to the inter­ac­tion between per­former and com­poser (some sec­tions are writ­ten out, others are impro­vised), to the inter­ac­tion of reg­is­ters, tex­tures, and formal elements.

Four Pieces for Accor­dion and String Quar­tet was writ­ten between the summer of 2002 and the fall of 2003. It was inspired by a series of poems called Swerve, by Cana­dian poet Sarah Lang. There are four poems in the series, which tell the story of a woman watch­ing her lover die of cancer. Four Pieces is ded­i­cated to my grand­mother, Antoinette Schulte, who was an accor­dion­ist and died of cancer when I was a child.

What inter­ested me about Swerve was the sen­sa­tion of the pas­sage of time con­veyed by the narrator’s emo­tions. I felt this had strong cor­re­la­tions with musi­cal form, and I wanted to try to trans­late the emo­tional form of Lang’s series into an instru­men­tal piece. There­fore, each poem in the set cor­re­sponds to a move­ment in Four Pieces, and each move­ment closely fol­lows the con­tent of the cor­re­spond­ing poem in Swerve.

Four Pieces was also my first suc­cess­ful attempt at the pur­pose­ful jux­ta­po­si­tion of dis­parate har­monic sys­tems. I wanted to be able to draw from a palette of func­tional and non-functional sonori­ties rang­ing from pop­u­lar music and jazz, to medieval, clas­si­cal, and twentieth-century West­ern music. I achieved this goal by plac­ing har­monic and melodic ideas in new local con­texts or by using the func­tion of one har­monic system with the mate­r­ial from another. Exam­ples include the osti­nato 6/3 chord in the first move­ment, trans­posed up a quar­ter­tone, and the func­tional cadence that ends the piece, dis­guised by dense pitch clus­ters and non-triadic sonorities.

listen to Viñes Passing Through

A mash-up by Steve Layton that uses Four Pieces.

Other sources: Ricardo Viñes – Menuet Spectral & En Verlaine Mineur, Christ­opher DeLau­renti – Tiger, Sara Peebles – Music for Incan­descent Events Joseph Drew – He Was a Poet

This piece reflects my ongo­ing inter­ests in sec­tional forms, doing away with tran­si­tional mate­r­ial, and the chal­leng­ing of aes­thetic assump­tions. There is no attempt to relate any of the mate­ri­als of the piece over the large scale. Instead, I have focused on a broad ges­ture—that of a long dimin­u­endo—that goes from begin­ning to end. Within that ges­ture are a series of thirty-one frag­ments, some with local rela­tion­ships to adjoin­ing frag­ments, some with­out. No struc­tures or orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ples have been used that are not imme­di­ately appar­ent to the ear, and each sec­tion is com­posed intu­itively with regard to pitch, rhythm, tone colour, and phras­ing. The piece also includes sev­eral the­atri­cal ele­ments, and is there­fore best appre­ci­ated in a live performance.

Credit for the idea of a Halo ballet goes to Gregory Oh, who commissioned the piece and arranged for me to work with choreographer Julia Aplin. To complement the unusual dance environment of the piece, I chose an unusual musical environment that is equally a hybrid of instrumental traditions, both classical and rock. The material of the piece develops a single harmonic and melodic progression, which moves from extremely slow and legato to extremely fast and frenetic. Through this diverse vocabulary, I hope to give the choreographer a range of expressions to work with, allowing her to demonstrate the full potential of the robotic Halo characters to function as dancers.

I wrote Hockey Story for Brazilian-Canadian pianist, Luciane Cardassi. Luciane had immigrated to Canada a couple of years beforehand and was interested in exploring the hockey culture of Canada. She was also looking for a piece that involved electronics and speaking or singing, which was a good fit for my compositional interests. A hockey theme is somewhat outside of my usual work, but I decided it would be a good challenge and provide me with some fresh perspectives.

The text is taken entirely from hockey terminology. I weave together short word-units in order to create a narrative that references what I see as aspects of the spirit of hockey, playing with both the meaning and sound of the words. Throughout the piece, there is a counterpoint between the voice, electronics (controlled by the pianist), and piano, creating a three-way dialogue.

Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby is an arrange­ment of Community-Normed, which was com­mis­sioned by the Con­tin­uum Ensem­ble in Toronto in 2008. I’ve become increas­ingly inter­ested in pre­sent­ing pieces in mul­ti­ple ver­sions and com­bi­na­tions. Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby, with a few changes, is also the middle move­ment of Community-Normed. I’ve also writ­ten a third ver­sion, for a cham­ber music con­fer­ence in Ver­mont in July 2009, with dif­fer­ent instru­men­ta­tion and adapted for ama­teur performers.

Why mul­ti­ple ver­sions? Because music today is mul­ti­ple. Every­one is exposed to music from mul­ti­ple cul­tures all the time, from mul­ti­ple time peri­ods, and in mul­ti­ple ver­sions. DJs remix pop songs, which are avail­able in numer­ous ver­sions, and do mash-ups that inter­twine mul­ti­ple tracks in the space of a few sec­onds. I think this is a good way to deal with the fact that we are, for the first time in his­tory, drown­ing in more music than anyone knows what to do with. For this reason, cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple ver­sions is an impor­tant project of mine.

Musi­cally, Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby presents a humor­ous musi­cal set­ting of trying to fall asleep with con­struc­tion going on out­side the window.

Kiss Around the World was commissioned by New Works Calgary and the Canada Council for the Arts for Ensemble Resonance. It is the second Around the World piece that I have written, taking a single word—in this case kiss—and presenting it in a wide variety of languages.

The idea of kissing takes on very different connotations in different languages, and I wanted to find a connotation that was as universal as possible. Therefore, in Kiss Around the World I decided to focus on the idea of the nurturing kiss, the kiss a parent would give a child. This was the most universal use of kissing I came across. Romantic kissing, which is what I initially thought would make the best focus, is not universal. It did not exist in much of Asia before the arrival of the Europeans; Koreans and Japanese actually use a modified form of the English word for romantic kissing.

Musically, Kiss Around the World is made up of a series of short sound units, usually one per word, that are arranged and developed into a lyrical, flowing texture. Being a composer obsessed with fragmentation and contrast, this was a novel and stimulating challenge for me that grew out of the theme of the piece and the musical materials at hand. The result is a soothing, gentle piece that has certain aspects of a lullaby, all the while employing the collage/mosaic techniques that are the hallmarks of my style. There is even a little collage surprise at the end of the piece…

This is the earliest piece in my catalogue that I would want performed again. I originally wrote the following about it:

This piece explores the process of learning the “hard way”, which is frequently a painful journey, but which in most cases ultimately leads to greater understanding, and perhaps in some greater happiness as well….

Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity is a col­lage. In fact, even the title is a col­lage: I took the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and com­bined it with a ref­er­ence to the cul­ture of Inter­net file shar­ing. I have been inter­ested in col­lage and the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of mate­r­ial for some time, because as the saying goes, good artists borrow but great artists steal. Col­lage is the most honest way to honour that prin­ci­ple, and I spent most of 2008 work­ing in this direction.

Col­lage, as well as related ideas such as sam­pling, remix, and mash-up, are among the few uni­fy­ing forces dri­ving artis­tic change today. Through video sites like YouTube and audio sites like ccMix­ter, these ideas have been respon­si­ble for renew­ing ama­teur art on a mass scale, for chal­leng­ing the stan­dards of cre­ativ­ity, for expand­ing musi­cal taste, and even for influ­enc­ing legal prece­dent.

For the first time in his­tory, we are drown­ing in art. There is too much music of the high­est artis­tic qual­ity for anyone to ever hope to expe­ri­ence. So how can artists con­tribute to cul­ture in a sit­u­a­tion like this? I think col­lage is an impor­tant part of the answer, and the proof is in the atti­tudes of those who grew up with the Inter­net. For many of them, art is not some­thing simply to be expe­ri­enced, it is a resource to be adapted, changed, built upon, and shared.

While com­pos­ing Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity, I gave myself some restric­tions in order to inspire cre­ativ­ity. For exam­ple, I decided to try to present all quo­ta­tions in as rec­og­niz­able a form as pos­si­ble. I did not allow myself to trans­pose frag­ments from their orig­i­nal tonal­i­ties, and I did not allow myself to com­pose my own new mate­r­ial to bridge together the quo­ta­tions—every note is bor­rowed. I also made tempo an inte­gral part of the musi­cal devel­op­ment, and I tried to make gram­mat­i­cal sense of all the text frag­ments I com­bined. Finally, every quote relates to the others in some way, either in terms of theme, title, text, artist, or (obvi­ously) musi­cal sounds.

Why call a piece Nothing? Well, in a word, curios­ity—most of my music has as its theme the ques­tion, “What hap­pens if…?” At the time I was writ­ing Noth­ing (winter 2004), I was both­ered by the almost total reliance on motivic devel­op­ment and form to gen­er­ate local and long-term inter­est in West­ern music. I won­dered if it might be pos­si­ble to “hear” some­thing as a coher­ent (and enjoy­able) piece of music with­out recourse to any formal or motivic rep­e­ti­tion. Hence, the title Noth­ing is a ref­er­ence to the cen­tral prob­lem of the piece: “What hap­pens if I have noth­ing (in the tra­di­tional sense) to con­nect with?”

I have since come to view this issue as a spe­cific case of the gen­eral prob­lems of musi­cal cog­ni­tion and our (largely) unques­tioned appro­pri­a­tion of orga­ni­za­tional par­a­digms devel­oped for and by eighteenth-century empiri­cism. Nev­er­the­less, the result remains the same, and as anyone who has tried to com­pose can tell you, having noth­ing is the same as having every­thing—there are end­less choices. So I had to find an alter­na­tive focus, and I decided to return to very basic meth­ods of hear­ing as a way of con­nect­ing musi­cal mate­r­ial. For exam­ple, instead of using melodic/harmonic motives, the open­ing of the piece uses a jux­ta­po­si­tion of pitched and non-pitched ele­ments to grab the listener’s atten­tion. Exactly which spe­cific pitched and non-pitched ele­ments are used is rel­a­tively unim­por­tant; the low-level con­trast between har­monic and inhar­monic sound spec­tra is what makes the music interesting.

Of course, this doesn’t com­pletely side­step motivic and formal orga­ni­za­tion, but it does push it back to a level that is gen­er­ally not dealt with exclu­sively. Motives and form become syn­ony­mous with tech­niques and mate­r­ial: pitched versus non-pitched; rhyth­mic versus non-rhythmic; these instru­ments together versus those instru­ments together; and so on. Nothing is not the kind of piece that is inspired by sym­met­ri­cal pat­terns or pyra­mi­dal short-term/long-term inter­re­la­tion—there are con­nect­ing links, as demanded by musi­cal cog­ni­tion, but if you come look­ing for devel­op­men­tal strate­gies of that sort, be pre­pared to end up with a whole lot of nothing.

This is a children’s solo piano piece based on the traditional Yoruban music for the deity of the same name, as practiced in the Cuban Santería tradition.

An interactive sound game for audience volunteers.

Recy­cled 80s Live is a col­lage of small frag­ments of ‘80s pop songs, recom­posed and recon­tex­tu­al­ized into a new, larger work. I chose this approach because artists have always bor­rowed mate­r­ial from one another, but copy­right is increas­ingly being abused to pre­vent bor­row­ing. This sit­u­a­tion is a threat to cul­ture and cre­ativ­ity in gen­eral and it deserves to receive atten­tion.

Copy­right has always had two roles, to pro­tect the rights of the cre­ator, but more broadly, to encour­age cre­ativ­ity. With­out copy­right, artists would never be prop­erly rewarded for their work and art would not get made. But with­out fair deal­ing pro­vi­sions (or fair use in the U.S.), copy­right law stran­gles cre­ativ­ity by making art­works inaccessible.

Over the past 100 years, cor­po­rate inter­ests have increas­ingly tried to restrict or remove fair deal­ing from copy­right. Copy­right in 1900 was only 14 years long and had to be offi­cially requested. This meant that artists at the time could draw on a huge store of rel­a­tively fresh mate­r­ial in their work, lead­ing to the explo­sion of cre­ativ­ity that marked the birth of Hol­ly­wood, the avant-garde, jazz, and more. Now copy­right is auto­matic, can last over 150 years, and legit­i­mate works that use fair deal­ing are fre­quently attacked in court by cor­po­rate inter­ests. This trend has only accel­er­ated with the rise of dig­i­tal music tech­nol­ogy and file sharing.

For this reason, Recy­cled 80s Live draws entirely from mate­r­ial still under copy­right, with­out per­mis­sion. This can be done under fair deal­ing as long as the new work cre­ates new artis­tic value and does not take away from the market for the orig­i­nals. I designed Recy­cled 80s Live to respect these bound­aries, work­ing within the tra­di­tion of mash-up artists such as John Oswald or Girl Talk, but with live musi­cians. My mes­sage, to adapt an old adage, is that your right to swing your copy­right ends where my music begins.

Schizo Psycho is based entirely on material from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. A 40-second clip of the movie plays repeatedly, with the ensemble providing different “personalities” on each repetition. All material is taken from the original score, but it is transformed in some way to create very different musical textures. Thus, I use some of the characteristic symptoms of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders as guiding principles in the arrangement of the musical material, creating both a play on words and a musical structure for the composition.

Written for the Quatuor Bozzini, the title of this piece can be loosely translated as “To go around oneself, to conform oneself”. Those concepts play a role in the musical material on several different levels: harmonic material, rhythmic structure, form, the push and pull of musical tradition, the choices the performers have to make, and so forth. My goal was to work in the space on the edge of comfort, where there is enough familiarity for both performers and audience to get into the piece, but also a strong musical challenge that pushes us to the “transcendence” experience that I seek in music.

In this piece, I return to predominantly quartertonal harmonies for the first time in a few years. However, the harmonic framework also fits loosely into G-sharp minor/B major. The intent, like in much of my microtonal work, is that the quartertones go largely unnoticed by the casual listener. I build up a type of pseudo-Renaissance structure, transparent and smooth, using quartertones not to approximate just intonation, but rather to create a sort of “what-if”, alternate-reality harmonic system.

The texts for the five pieces in this set are taken from spam email mes­sages that I col­lected in 2006. I am attracted to the idea of using spam email texts because of what they rep­re­sent. Since the pur­pose of com­mer­cial spam is always to trick some­one into spend­ing money, these texts are always tar­geted at our most deep-seated fears and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. This makes them a pow­er­ful source of sub­ject matter.

Each of the five texts tries to exploit spe­cific vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, described below:

1. Sen­sa­tional Rev­o­lu­tion in Med­i­cine — Phys­i­cal infir­mity, fail­ure of con­ven­tional treat­ments, lack of hope.
2. The Most Impor­tant Work of Your Career — Job dis­sat­is­fac­tion, appeals to authority.
3. One Hun­dred Seventy-Three Cen­time­tres, Fifty-Three Kilo­grams — Lone­li­ness, lack of social inter­ac­tion, lack of roman­tic opportunity.
4. Dear User. Why Don’t You… — Lack of self-confidence, prob­lems with body image, lust.
5. A Time of Resource — Greed, feel­ings of miss­ing out, peer pressure.

This piece is based on the sound of the word shit in twelve dif­fer­ent lan­guages. It trav­els from west to east geo­graph­i­cally across the world. The lan­guages were chosen either because I speak them, or because I could find a native speaker of that lan­guage to teach me how to say shit. I did, how­ever, attempt to keep a some­what even spac­ing between geo­graph­i­cal areas, although a com­pletely even dis­tri­b­u­tion would have been, of course, impos­si­ble to realize.

Two years’ dis­tance and fresh ears have made me decide to rename this piece, orginally called Quar­tet, to Short/Long. These are the titles of the two move­ments and reflect the kinds of artic­u­la­tions and phras­ing that I employed.

Always on. Instan­ta­neous. No down time. Avail­able. Abbre­vi­ated. Abuse of excla­ma­tion marks. Multi-tasking. Frag­men­ta­tion. Ille­gal? Dangerous… In-the-moment. Mul­ti­ple direc­tions. Too many vari­ables to con­sider at once. Impa­tient. Faster. Abstrac­tion. Con­crete. Asphalt. Fol­low­ing dis­tance. Reac­tion time.

I wrote this cham­ber opera for three singers and six instru­men­tal­ists in con­junc­tion with Colleen Murphy for Tapestry’s Opera To Go series. It tells the story of a young East­ern Euro­pean woman (Oksana) who has found her­self in the safe­house of an Ital­ian priest (Alessan­dro). She has escaped from a pimp (Kon­stan­tin), who tricked her into pros­ti­tu­tion, and now finds that she is falling in love with Alessan­dro. He in turn, despite his priestly call­ing, finds him­self tempted by Oksana. During this scene, they dance around the com­pli­ca­tions of their sit­u­a­tion, each one afraid to reveal him- or her- self to the other. In addi­tion, another prob­lem presents itself at the end of the scene.

This is the first work I did with Colleen Murphy, while we were par­tic­i­pat­ing in Tapestry’s LibLab in August 2005. The story is about a man who has had an acci­dent, and his unfaith­ful wife/girlfriend who acci­den­tally reveals her infi­delity as she tries to com­fort him.

This piece deals with my interest in both transitional musical materials and the transitive nature of sound itself, which disappears almost as soon as it is created. I have conceived the form of the piece as an exploration of transition, presenting numerous sounds in motion as they come into and out of existence in time, and showing them from several perspectives so as to allow the effects of time and transition to change the very nature of the sounds and suggest new meanings.